Neighborhood individuals are periodically charged expensive fees to have television, telephone and other future communications services provided to their homes. If these individuals could be formed into a network entity, then the resulting economic leverage of these networked individuals create a better negotiation position for reducing the charges of these services. That is, an organization representing five-hundred or more service subscribers has more negotiating leverage than one subscriber.
As a result, the residential community would have the prerogative of selecting television channels that are consistent with the religious, moral and ethical standards of the community. However, if individual subscribers in the community insist on channels which would be offensive to the community, these channels can be encoded for the specific purchaser and the cost of service charged directly to the user. Products are in use which provide television, data and telephone service to the community.
However, available neighborhood network technology has insufficient bandwidth to accommodate all the data associated with television, telephone and other communications services, making a neighborhood network impractical and expensive. Furthermore, such network systems do not accommodate varying data formats such as synchronous transmissions typical of television transmissions, and asynchronous transmission typical of computer data transmissions. For example, present network broadcasts of video are generally limited to uni-directional distribution. Ideally any next generation residential network not only must incorporate the bandwidth necessary for high definition television transmission but must allow those transmissions bi-directional to accommodate high definition video conferencing.
An example of a product used for wireless communication is an OmniBeam available from Laser Communications, Inc. Such products are expensive and are limited in throughput bandwidth or data transfer rates. Furthermore, such systems rely on long range point-to-point transmissions using concentrating lenses, requiring precision alignment.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,113,403 issued to Block et al., discloses a bi-directional free-space optical bus for electronics subsystems. A bi-directional optical link orients a beam with a polarizing beamsplitter such that the beam travels as a linearly polarized P-wave. The beam then travels through a quarter-wave plate which converts the polarization of the beam into a circular polarization mode. The beam travels through an amplitude beamsplitter to reflect the beam into two collinear axial beams along both directions of the axis of a single optical bus to interconnect computer subsystems.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,183,054 issued to Patisaul et al., discloses a digital communication technique for a television communication system. The television channels are obtained and multiplexed, then transmitted through an LED to generate an encoded optical signal. The encoded signal is received by a photodetector which converts the optical signals into electrical signals. The signal is then demultiplexed into individual channels. A problem with such a device is that it is limited to distributing data and does not allow the addition of data by users. A further problem is that data is limited to synchronous transmissions.
Thus, a need exists for a neighborhood network device that has a large data rate of at least 1.5 Giga-bits-per-second for accommodating video and audio synchronous and asynchronous data transmissions, which is also has unidirectional and bi-directional data transmission capability in a digital format for data distribution within and without the neighborhood community.